Living That No-Neighbor Life
by JessieJay13
Summary: So the real estate agent makes the assumption that their marriage involves sex. Most people do! Derek sees it on his face the second Stiles decides to be a dick about it this time, but he knows better than to think he can stop it. All he can do is pinch the bridge of his nose and brace himself as the bright, false smile lights up his beloved husband's face.


The first place was an apartment and it was too cramped. The second was a duplex but wasn't nearly nice enough for the price. The third was a tract house that may or may not have been the set of a horror movie in the past, or if it hadn't then it was missing its chance. By the fourth place, Derek was starting to lose faith in their frazzled but determinedly perky real estate agent.

"This next one is a real _zinger,_ " she said after each flop. "Best of the bunch! I've been fighting people off with a stick!"

Stiles had snorted the first two times she'd said it, laughed outright the third, and by now he had resorted to mocking her under his breath and shooting exasperated looks at Derek.

Derek could handle the perkiness if he had to—that sort of attitude tended to deflate when it ran into his natural stoicism anyway, at least after a while—but Stiles' tendency towards earnest-sounding sarcasm just added fuel to her fire when she didn't recognize that it _was_ sarcasm. She took it at face value and genuinely thought that he was as excited as she was.

With this mistaken camaraderie in mind, she seemed to have taken Stiles as more of a new friend than a client she needed to be professional with. She kept whispering asides to him conspiratorially, thinking Derek couldn't hear her, which made the both of them roll their eyes as soon as she turned away to espouse the virtues of the newest property.

It was never anything bad or mean-spirited, at least. Just gossipy.

"No worrying about landlords here, no sir! Only so many times you can _lie_ about the dog before you lose your mind, am I right?"

"The owner says these are the original floors, but between you and me? Definitely re-paneled. Twice!"

"Hell of a catch you got with this one, kid. _Hubba-hubba!_ "

That last one was a little cringe-worthy, but it was far from the first time Derek had overheard comments like that about himself. He was used to it, and even Stiles had taken that one on the chin with a smile and a "Yup, he's all mine!"

But then they reached the seventh place on the agent's never-ending list. It was a gorgeous two-story house with an open floor plan, a backyard that bordered a small strip of woods, and an isolation that drove the price down where they could afford it without dipping into the Hale insurance money. Derek was smiling almost as soon as he got out of the car, seeing wide windows perfectly positioned to let in the kind of light he would need for his painting. Stiles bumped his shoulder on the way up the drive and took off to explore as soon as the agent got the door open.

"It's a bit out of the way," the agent said apologetically. "But the road's got a straight shot into town and the school zoning is excellent, for whenever _that_ comes up for you two. This house is definitely big enough for a few young 'uns! Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, more than enough!"

"Der, this place has got a trap door to the roof. How cool is _that?_ " Stiles called as he came clomping down the staircase. "You can see over the trees for like fifty miles in every direction."

"Fifty miles?" Derek repeated. "Really?"

"Maybe slightly hyperbolic," Stiles allowed, "but that's totally not the point. There's no one around anywhere."

For a growing pack of werewolves with a penchant for getting into fights, that could only be a good thing. Fewer witnesses, fewer potential civilian casualties, fewer people to notice when the inevitable second generation started teething with actual fangs.

The agent though, humans as she was, set about apologizing again right away, listing all the compensating features ad nauseam. Derek was content to ignore her, focusing all his attention on watching Stiles flit around the spacious living room, running his hands over all the display furniture and poking his head out all of the windows.

But then the agent ended her sales pitch with a nudge to Stiles' side and a sly, "And no nosy neighbors? No shared walls? That just means you can be as loud as you want in the bedroom, am I right?"

Derek saw it on his face the second Stiles decided to be a dick about it, but he knew better than to think he could stop it. All he could do was pinch the bridge of his nose and brace himself as the bright, false smile lit up his beloved husband's face.

"Yes!" Stiles said definitively. "Yes, you are _so right!_ God, Derek, that'll be such a relief, won't it?"

"Sure it will, honey."

"Finally, we can put away the gags," Stiles went on with an exaggerated sigh of relief. He leaned in toward the agent, whose mouth had fallen open in shock; she clearly had not expected him to agree in such sordid detail. "You know, our last neighbors _hated_ us. You'd never believe how many noise complaints we got because of our sex noises. We just—"

Stiles stopped to scoff, his eyebrows doing a complicated wriggling motion that was probably intended to be suggestive. He sent Derek a commiserating look that didn't falter in the slightest when Derek's response was less than impressed.

"We just have so much sex!" Stiles said loudly to the scandalized agent. "Like, _so much sex!_ Really, just, everywhere, you know? I'm so glad this place has three bedrooms, 'cause we're gonna need 'em, you know what I mean? And don't even get me started on that bathtub upstairs! That'll be perfect for that thing we do every single night with the—"

"Stiles."

"Won't it, Der?" Stiles asked, undeterred. "No neighbors, Derek! Isn't that great for all that sex we're having? So much sex, I'm surprised we haven't pulled a muscle, but we're still young and there'll be time for more sex-related injuries when we're old and decrepit and still having sex, right?"

"So you, uh…" the poor agent started to say, but she was so shell-shocked that it took her several seconds to rally herself. "So you...like the house then?"

"Of course we do, it's perfect for having—"

"We like the house," Derek said, firmly enough to put an end to it. "We're going to look around a bit more today, if you don't mind, but we'll meet you back at your office to finish the paperwork at your earliest convenience. Thanks for your time."

She bustled out the door without even a cheerful "have a nice day," and Stiles was laughing the second she was out of hearing range, bent over with the force of it and braced on his knees.

"Aw, man, did you see her _face?_ "

"Was that really necessary?" Derek asked, though the corners of his mouth were turning up no matter how hard he tried to pull them into something disapproving. He could never resist a smile when Stiles laughed like that, even after all these years.

"Sure it was," Stiles said, straightening up and wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. "If people are gonna make assumptions like that, then they should be prepared to get confirmation of it. Don't bring up sex if you don't wanna talk about sex."

"Assumptions like thinking a married couple probably have sex with each other?" Derek asked. "That's not exactly out of the ballpark. It's an assumption pretty much everyone makes."

"Well, they shouldn't," Stiles said staunchly, coming forward to wrap arms around Derek's waist and pull him close. "Just because we're married, that doesn't require sex. Asexuality is a thing and sex-repulsion is also a thing and—"

"And most people don't know that."

"They should," Stiles repeated. "And I will mock them until they do."

"I appreciate your oblique efforts towards educating the world about my orientation," Derek said, half joking and half sincere, "but all that? Did you really have to traumatize her with graphic accounts of our fictional sex life?"

"She started it!" Stiles protested. "I just responded in kind. It's not my fault she wasn't prepared to hear the answer to her own question. What's wrong with appreciating the irony here?"

Derek shook his head. "I don't think that's quite what irony is, babe."

"Fuck if I know," Stiles said with a shrug. "That one song really fucked up my understanding of the concept. If rain on your wedding day isn't ironic, then what the hell is? Seriously."

"Not this."

"That's very helpful, love, thank you for your input on the subject."

Despite his snark, Stiles dropped a kiss on Derek's lips before extricating himself from the embrace. He headed toward the back of the house instead, leaning out the back door to critically eye the yard and moving on to poke around in the kitchen. Derek was content to let Stiles take the lead on the in depth examination; they'd both already decided they were going to buy it anyway. This was just Stiles' natural curiosity and nosiness at work.

"She was right about one thing," Stiles said as Derek followed in his wake, already lost in imaginings of Stiles cooking here, bed-headed and in his pajamas, early on a Sunday morning with the sunrise gilding him through the east-facing row of windows.

"What's that?" Derek asked absently. But his attention was caught fully when Stiles turned back to him with the most beautiful smile on his face, small and soft and brilliantly happy.

"It's perfect for kids," he said and Derek's heart swelled almost painfully in his chest, crowding the sudden lump in his throat.

"Yeah," he managed to say. "Yeah, it really is, isn't it?"

"I can just see it," Stiles said, staring out the nearest window with eyes unfocused. "A little girl with your dark hair, running around out there and clawing her way up trees, growling with her little toddler fangs."

Derek could see it too. It brought back memories of his childhood, back when there had been half a dozen kids in the Hale family, always playing tag in the woods with his sisters and play-fighting his cousins until one of them tagged out and escaped up a tree just like Stiles was describing. For all that Derek's life had been marked by tragedy over and over again, at least he could honestly say that he'd had a happy childhood. And he would make damn sure his kids got the same.

Stiles was still lost in his fantasizing. "Or maybe she'll have Lydia's hair," he amended. "I don't know how this whole surrogacy thing works, really. I can never remember which set of genes is doing what." He shrugged loosely. "Not that it matters. Your and Lydia's baby is gonna be fucking _stunning_ no matter how the chips fall there."

Derek had to frown at that. "It won't be my and Lydia's baby," he reminded him. "It's _ours._ "

"No, yeah, I know," Stiles said quickly, turning back to face him. "I can't not know that, trust me. This may be Lydia's test run for motherhood, but it's the real deal for us."

"Test run?" Derek repeated, eyebrow raised. "Is that what she's calling it now?"

"Not in so many words," Stiles said with a laugh, leaning back to perch on the thin windowsill as best he could. "But that's totally what it is. I think she's deemed the morning sickness and sore back acceptable, but the way people keep trying to do things _for_ her and make her sit down might be a deal breaker on the whole pregnancy thing."

"Allison can be a tiny bit of a worrywart," Derek agreed, thinking back on the last time he'd seen the two of them. Allison had been _insisting_ that she could carry seven bags of snack food from the car to Scott's house by herself and without any help from her pregnant girlfriend who should really go inside and put her feet up.

"She's not the least bit concerned about the actual birthing part," Stiles said. "I'm pretty sure she's just withholding her final judgment on the matter until she sees how we handle the first few months of newborn stress."

"I can almost guarantee Cora will have identical findings," Derek told him, but Stiles was already shushing him.

"No, don't start saying stuff like that!" he hissed. "You're gonna jinx it! She hasn't officially agreed yet, remember?"

"But she will," Derek assured him. He closed the gap between them until he could take Stiles' face in his hands. "I know my sister, Stiles. She may be iffy on having kids of her own right now, but she wants me to be happy. And she wants to continue the Hale line as much as I do, one way or another."

That was something they had talked about together. Theirs had always been a big family, and the thought of it being culled down to just the two of them hurt in more ways than just them missing the loved ones they had lost. Not to mention that the Hales had been one of the oldest, longest-standing born werewolf packs in the country. True strength ran in their blood, as well as a propensity for the full wolf shift. It was such a rare ability nowadays, he and Cora both agreed it would be a shame not to pass it on.

"Even if it means being my baby mama?" Stiles asked.

Derek snorted before he could stop himself. "If you ever call her that where she can hear, I guarantee she will call the whole thing off and also probably kick you in the balls hard enough to prevent you from _ever_ having children with _anyone,_ much less her," he warned.

"Nah," Stiles said, unconcerned, fingers finding their way naturally to Derek's belt loops and pulling him in further. "She loves me almost as much as you do."

Derek hummed in consideration before leaning in that last little bit to place a kiss on Stiles' forehead. "I don't know about that," he said. "I set the bar pretty high."

Stiles chuckled, his scent warm and spicy and positively reeking of affection, just as Derek was sure his was. Derek couldn't help but breathe it in and revel in it, hoping to god that they kept hold of this giddy kind of love long enough to embarrass their children with moments like this.

"You know," Stiles said innocently, glancing up at him in a way that was probably meant to be coy but was far too eager to manage it, "that bathtub upstairs really is perfect for two."

Taking a bubble bath together, swaddled in intimate warmth and all wrapped up in each other, was a glorious idea, and one that they indulged in on a regular basis even though their current apartment really wasn't equipped for it. There was just one problem that Derek felt obliged to point out: "I think it's probably tactless to get naked in a house before even the down payment."

Stiles' smirk was completely unrepentant when he said, "I guess it's a good thing I'm not known for my tact then, isn't it?"

He shouted with laughter as Derek chased him up the stairs, the bright sound of it echoing loudly all around their soon-to-be home, and for once there were no grouchy neighbors to complain.


End file.
